Britten: Tit for Tat

Britten wrote his Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, Op. 74 for the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 1965. The singer admired the ‘concentration and enigmatic smile’ of the settings, and Britten constructed, through alternation of proverbs with songs, and an intense contemplation on the human and the eternal, one of his greatest song cycles. By contrast Tit for Tat sees Britten revisiting youthful, light-spirited settings of the poet Walter de la Mare. The folk-song arrangements are amongst his most famous, and beloved.

Britten’s song cycles are some of the greatest produced in the twentieth century. This disc focuses on his Blake cycle, one of his deepest and most contemplative. It’s contrasted with a very different and youthful cycle of five called Tit for Tat, written when he was a teenager.

The baritone Roderick Williams encompasses a wide repertoire, from baroque to contemporary music, in the opera house, on the concert platform and in recital. His recital appearances have taken him to London’s Wigmore Hall and many European festivals. He has an extensive discography and his recordings of English song with Iain Burnside have received particular acclaim.

28 pp booklet, essay and sung texts

Britten was a prolific composer of songs throughout his creative life, producing over 100 settings for voice and piano, in addition to the works for voice and orchestra. His songs for voice and piano – of which this is the first in a two-volume 4CD cycle, contain settings by poets as diverse as Michelangelo, Hölderlin, Hardy, Pushkin, Auden and Soutar.

The earliest songs date from 1922, when Britten was just nine years old – ‘Beware!’ and two other songs were from this period were reassessed by the composer in 1968, but not published until 1985. These rarities display little of the mature composer’s style, but they are confident and charming settings. The touching ‘Lilian’ and ‘The Joy of Grief’ are also early songs and receive their premiere recordings here. Mature Britten is represented by the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Winter Words and the 1965 cycle The Poet’s Echo.

This survey of all Britten’s songs for voice and piano is a major project, and Malcolm Martineau has assembled some of the finest young singers of our time for this fascinating journey through repertoire that spans the period 1922–1971.

The unbeatable, multi-award-winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake turn to the composer Benjamin Britten for their latest Hyperion release.

Although Britten is particularly celebrated for the substantial body of music he composed for the tenor voice, the composer also left an important legacy of music for baritone. Characteristically, Britten’s output for low voice was also inspired by the talents of specific performers with whom he was closely associated, among them Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and John Shirley-Quirk. In addition to song-cycles, individual songs and folksong arrangements, Britten wrote challenging baritone roles in operas as diverse as Billy Budd (1951), Owen Wingrave (1970) and Death in Venice (1972)—the title role of the second of these made very much Gerald Finley’s own in his magnificent interpretation in Margaret Williams’s 2001 television film of the opera.

This disc contains Britten’s two important song cycles for baritone: Tit for Tat, setting the poems of Walter de la Mare, and the more substantial and challenging Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. The latter was written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; designed to showcase his unique blend of intense lyricism and dramatic characterization, qualities which are undoubtedly also exhibited by Gerald Finley.

Also included are some of Britten’s popular folksong settings, and a selection of later songs, which received exposure and publication only after the composer’s death in December 1976.

The names of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears are forever linked by their personal and creative partnership. Composer and interpreter have rarely enjoyed so long-standing or fruitful relationship. They met and became friends in 1937 while going through the papers of a mutual friend who had accidentally died. Within a couple of years, they had established a relationship that would last a lifetime and embrace virtually all aspects of their lives.

These seminal recordings include the first release on CD of Who are these Children?, Tit for Tat and When the cock begins to crow, and re-introduces after a long absence from the catalogue, the Michelangelo Sonnets and Winter Words. A bonus is the only song from On this island that Pears/Britten recorded for Decca - 'Let the florid music praise'.

Benjamin Britten was born on the day of the Patron Saint of Music – St. Cecilia – 22nd November in 1913 in Lowestoft. He showed remarkable skill at composition from his earliest days. In 1924 he met Frank Bridge (1879-1941), a fine composer in his own right, and became his pupil; through him he developed an appreciation of contemporary music with scores by Bartók and the Schönberg school, particulary Berg.

In 1930 he entered the Royal College of Music and developed the pianistic skills which made him such a brilliant interpreter of both his own music and other greats particularly Mozart and Schubert. From these times date the beautiful A Hymn to the Virgin, Quatre Chansons Françaises and the Sinfonietta, his official Op. 1. He visited Vienna in 1934 and saw Wozzeck but family resistance prevented him studying with Berg (who, in any case, died from blood poisoning caused by an insect sting a year later).

He worked for some years in the film unit of the General Post Office where he met W.H. Auden whose poetry inspired the brilliant song cycle Our Hunting Fathers. The experience in the film unit enabled him to develop the expressive immediacy and technical abilities – often using small and unconventional resources – which would assist his composition of operas in the years to come.

In 1939 he decided to follow Auden to America, accompanying him was the tenor Peter Pears (1910-1986) who was to be the inspiration behind so many great operatic roles and song cycles. There he composed the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Michelangelo Sonnets and the First Quartet. His first opera, Paul Bunyan, to an Auden libretto, was also composed there but then withdrawn (it was revived for the Aldeburgh Festival in the year he died).

He started to get the pangs of homesickness especially when he read, by chance, an article by E.M. Forster on the Suffolk poet Crabbe (whose work was to lead to arguably his greatest success) and he returned to England in 1942. He wrote A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to St. Cecilia (another Auden text) during this year.

For British Opera the date 7th June 1945 will always remain a red-letter day as it heralded the premiere of a masterpiece, Peter Grimes. The triumph not only established Britten as Purcell’s successor as Britain’s greatest music dramatist but its numerous performances abroad showed that Britain had an international composer celebrity.

The Rape of Lucretia was premiered the following year as was the work by which Britten is probably best remembered – certainly by thankful schoolchildren for their guide to the Orchestra. Here he subjects the theme by Purcell to a series of ingenious variations played by each member of the orchestra and then as groups and finally a fugue where everything comes together in a simply unforgettable coda.

Indeed when one examines Britten’s output it is hard not to credit him with at least one work of genius, if not a masterpiece, virtually every year for the rest of his composing life – whether it be an opera, for example The Turn of the Screw in 1954 or A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1960; a choral work, for example Spring Symphony in 1949 or the War Requiem in 1961, a large vocal work, for example Serenade for tenor, horn and strings in 1943, Nocturne in 1958 and Phaedra in 1975; a smaller vocal work, for example the Canticles of 1947, 1952, 1954, 1971 & 1974; the works he wrote for Mstislav Rostropovich – the Cello Sonata in 1961, the Cello Symphony in 1963 and the three Solo Cello Suites in 1964, 1967 & 1971; the two remaining string quartets in 1945 & 1975 and a full length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas in 1956.

Besides setting many classic poets from Britain including Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Donne, Hardy, Keats, Jonson, Milton, Owen, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, Tennyson and Wordsworth he also set texts in French (Hugo, Rimbaud and Verlaine), Italian (Michelangelo), German (Hölderlin) and Russian (Pushkin). He was also partly responsible for the reawakening of interest in the music of his great predecessor, Henry Purcell by making realizations of a large number of his works. He also launched the music festival in his adopted town of Aldeburgh.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of England’s greatest composer since Henry Purcell, Decca Classics presents the ultimate Britten box

Britten and Decca enjoyed a unique relationship with the composer, recording most of his key works for the label. Decca’s 1963 set of the War Requiem remains one of the fastest-selling classical releases of all time. The recordings not in the Decca catalogue have been licensed from other companies including EMI, Virgin Classics, Naxos and Warner – a total of 18 rights holders have assisted to make this extraordinary achievement possible, plus the endorsement & support of the Britten-Pears Foundation.

Benjamin Britten was born 22nd November 1913, the feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of music. Over four intensely creative decades he went on to publish over 100 works, of which the most important dominated and shaped their respective genres – opera with Peter Grimes, the choral oratorio with War Requiem, music to inspire newcomers (Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra), the Song Cycle (Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings). The sheer range is astonishing.

Britten is the subject of a colossal campaign, Britten100, under the auspices of the Britten-Pears Foundation who have invested £6.5 million in further driving international awareness of the composer.

This 65-CD edition is guaranteed to appeal to Britten enthusiasts worldwide.

· Individually numbered, limited edition (1 to 3,000)

· 208-page hardback book including:-

- A gallery of original LP sleeves, arranged chronologically from 1953 onwards

- Copious Recording session pictures and beautiful Aldeburgh landscapes newly photographed

- ‘Choosing a Record Company’ by discographer Philip Stuart

- ‘Ben – A Tribute to Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)’ by John Culshaw (originally published in Gramophone Magazine, February 1977)

- Peter Glossop’s Memoir on the role of Billy Budd and working with Britten

- Complete alphabetical index of works included in the edition.

· The set is organised into 4 main sections, each with its own individual book:

The Operas; Stage & Screen; Voices; Instruments

· Each book contains a detailed article by Andrew Huth, full track listings and recording information.

· 4 bonus CDs - including a series of interviews by Jon Tolansky, first recordings and rarities never before released on CD and the War Requiem rehearsal sequence

· New War Requiem hi-res transfer from original master tapes

· The set also features the Tony Palmer film on the making of the 1967 recording of The Burning Fiery Furnace, an unrivalled look at John Culshaw and the Decca team at work